1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a building management system, and specifically to a cyclic building maintenance work schedule table preparation system useful in preparing a schedule table of cyclic work in advance upon sending workers to periodically visit client buildings under a maintenance contract to conduct inspection and the like of the buildings.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, a variety of facilities led by elevators and/or escalators is provided inside a building. If one or more of these facilities become out of order, substantial inconvenience is given not only to tenants, dwellers or the like of the building but also to visitors, guests, customers and/or the like of the building. These facilities, therefore, require certain strict maintenance. The maintenance of these building facilities, however, must be conducted only by those having professional knowledge. As a consequence, the owner of a building generally concludes a contract with a maintenance service company specialized in the maintenance of these building facilities and entrusts the maintenance service company with the maintenance of the facilities. To meet such clients' desires, the maintenance service company sends professional workers to periodically visit the buildings of the client and to provide the clients with services such as inspection, repair, maintenance and the like of the facilities. To ensure such periodical visits, it is necessary to allocate the names and visiting dates of buildings, which are to be visited, to the individual workers. This allocation has heretofore been conducted by applying, with magnets, building name plates, worker name plates and the like on a diary board hung on a wall of a branch office. Such a diary board, however, lacks reliability because the name plates may drop from the diary board or the diary board itself may drop from the wall when large vibrations are applied and people passing by the diary board tend to bump and dislodge the name plates. The above-mentioned allocation must itself be conducted by well-experienced personnel and, moreover, the allocation requires appreciable time, thereby creating additional problems. Reasons for these problems will hereinafter be described.
First, it is necessary to allocate buildings such that each worker can visit buildings in the same area as much as possible, since the efficiency of cyclic maintenance work is better when visits are limited to the same area. Second, two workers may have to be allocated to the same building on the same date because two workers may be needed depending on the details of cyclic maintenance work, for example, for the repair of an elevator. Third, it is necessary to allocate the buildings after advance ascertainment of the work schedule (holiday, meeting, business trip, etc.) of each worker in advance. Fourth, working dates may be designated by clients. Priority must be given to such buildings upon allocation. Fifth, a standard building management contract generally requires two visits a month. There are, however, contracts which require only one visit every 2 or 3 months. Buildings must therefore be managed independently to avoid omission of building name plates which were not required in the preceding month. Sixth, some buildings may have to be allocated with top priority under unexpected circumstances such that the previous cyclic maintenance was not conducted as scheduled or the cyclic maintenance of the next month is to be conducted in advance. Seventh, allocation must be effected in comparison with the schedule for repair and countermeasure of other buildings because efficiency deteriorates if buildings are visited one after another only for repair and/or countermeasure work. Eighth, the facilities of each building must be subjected to the inspection requirements set by law. It is therefore necessary to allocate the building while checking against an inspection schedule so that the inspection of the building can be conducted within the specified term. Ninth, depending on the details of work, a high degree of skill may be required. Such work must be allocated to a worker having an appropriate certificate and experience. Tenth, the working time differs depending on the facilities of each building. Allocation must therefore be conducted with a view toward not exceeding the available daily working time of each worker.
To meet these requirements, the following proposal has been made. This will be described with reference to FIGS. 19 and 20. FIG. 19 is a block diagram of a cyclic building maintenance work schedule table preparation system. In a computer center 1 where processing of data of contracted client buildings is performed collectively, a memory 1a and a transmitter-receiver 1b are installed along with other equipment (not shown). To this computer center 1, a number of branch offices 2 are connected via a communications network 3. Each branch office 2 is equipped with a transmitter-receiver 2a, a display unit 2b having first and second display areas, an input means for operating the display unit 2b--said input means consisting of an input unit 2c, such as a keyboard, and a mouse 2d--and a control unit 2e for conducting predetermined control. An appropriate number of workers are stationed at each branch office 2, and the maintenance and management of the client buildings assigned to the branch office 2 are conducted by these workers.
The operation of the above system will next be described with reference FIG. 20, which is a plan view of details of a table displayed on the display unit 2b. As is shown in FIG. 20, the display unit 2b has a first display area 4 and a second display area 5. At the first display area 4, buildings B.sub.1,B.sub.2, . . . . B.sub.n, . . . entrusted to the branch office 2 are displayed in order. These building names and their arrangement will be described later. Displayed at the second display area 5 is a table in which the dates and days of each month are arranged horizontally while the names a,b, . . . of the workers belonging to the branch office are arranged vertically. A work schedule table preparator of the branch office successively allocates the client buildings while watching the building names displayed at the first display area 4 and also taking into consideration such various conditions as described above. This preparation work will be described later.
A description will now be made of the building names displayed at the first display area 4. First, at the computer center 1, based on the data stored in advance, the buildings are classified depending on their areas and the buildings in each area are then classified into two groups, one requiring two workers and the other one worker. In this case, in view of the fact that cyclic maintenance is conducted twice a month for each building as a standard and, regarding the details of work, two-man job and one-man job are alternated, the same building name is classified as both a two-man job and a one-man job. The building names classified as described above are stored in the memory 1a. At the branch office 2, the building names stored in the memory 1a of the computer center 1 are displayed at the first display area 4 of the display unit 2a via the communications network 3.
The work schedule table preparator then successively allocates the building names to the individual dates and workers displayed at the second display area 5. This is performed using the mouse 2d. To allocate, for example, the building B.sub.1 to the cyclic work of the worker a for March 1, the building name B.sub.1 displayed at the first display area 4 is designated by the mouse 2d and the box defined by the worker a and the date is then designated by the mouse 2d. As a result, the building name B.sub.1 disappears from the first display area 4 and appears in the box.
Upon completion of a work schedule table by successively repeating such an operation, the branch office 2 sends data of the thus-completed work table other than the work details to the computer center 1 via the communications network 3, whereby these data are stored in place of the previously-stored building names in the memory 1a at the computer center 1. As a result, the building names relating to the work for the month are stored in the memory 1a in a form classified in accordance with their dates and areas, in the memory 1a. Based on the data so stored and other data, data on work for the next month will be prepared.
The cyclic maintenance work schedule table preparation system of FIG. 19 can perform the preparation of such a table far more easily and accurately than that achieved with the conventional preparation of a work table on a diary board. Nevertheless, the work schedule table preparator is required to busily operate the mouse while taking the conditions of the client buildings and those of the workers into parallel consideration. As far as the load for the preparation of a work schedule table is concerned, the above system still imposes a substantial load and is hence not much different from the conventional manner in this respect.